Authorship And Google Profile Picture In Google Search Results

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Google authorship is a new feature addition from Google to display author information in search results. Google displays author name as well as author’s Google profile picture in search results. This will appear near to the content that you may have written and is available in the Google Search Result.
As mentioned by Google this feature is being rolled out gradually and will be implemented algorithmically.
If you are a blog author or website owner who publishes quality content, you can take advantage of this new Google Authorship feature. If your content appears in Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP), then Google may display your Google Profile Picture and name next to the displayed result. The profile picture in the search result will link to your Google Profile page.

How to Display your Profile Picture in Google Search Result next to your content?

If you are a Blog author or website owner you can configure the “Authorship” so that your Google Profile picture appears next to your content in Google Search Result.
You need to take few steps to make sure that your profile and your blog are ready for “Authorship“. This is nothing but to tell the Google Search Engine that you are the author of a particular content. You need to complete the below steps to achieve this. These are not complicated steps but simple and straightforward.

Step 1: Setup the Google Profile

Create a Google Profile (If you have not already created) and add photograph of yourself as the Profile Picture. Google says the photograph should be of high quality in order to be eligible for be shown as a thumbnail in search results.

Authorship Markup anchor tag (<a> rel attributes (rel=”author” and rel=”me”) and XFN Microformats

Authorship can be marked using the “author” value of the “rel” attribute of anchor tag. (HTML5 <a> rel Attribute ). Also the XFN identity rel Value rel=”me” link attribute defined in XFN microformat can be used to establish a link between profile pages. XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network) is a unique and simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks.
Let us see how you can set the identify author information using the above information and link them to your Google Profile.

Step 2 : Create “About Me” page and link it to Your Google profile using the rel=”me” identity attribute

If you own a blog or website you should be having an “About Me” page. Here you can link your Google profile using the rel=”me” identity attribute. For example you can add something similar to the below.

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 <a rel="me" href="https://plus.google.com/117341404717640025660/"> Binu George </a>

Step 3: Link every blog article to the About Me page using rel=”author” link attribute

You need to link every article to your “About Me” page now. For example you can add something similar to the below one

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 <a rel="author" href="http://www.globinch.com/about/">Binu George</a>

Step 4: Now link your “About Me” to Google Profile

Now you need to add your blog URL to the Links section of your Google Profile. Sign in to your Google Profiles account. You can see the “Links” Section. Under the links, add a new custom link that points to your “About Me” page. Tick the option that says “This page is specifically about me” and save the changes.

Step 5: How To Test your Authorship links

You can test the changes using the rich snippets testing tool from Google Webmaster tools  . This tool will tell you whether you have configured all the links related to authorship properly or not.

That’s all. Now sit back and relax. Next time Google spider crawls your site, they will find your Authorship links . If you are lucky and has already done  good SEO homework and optimization you may see your profile picture next to your content in Google Search Result page.